Entries categorized "Donna Gratehouse"

Fresh on the heels of the SB1062 veto, and with national columnists hungry to meet deadlines with something “insightful” about Arizona, the Chamber of Commerce crowd is really pushing the “Clean Elections done it!” myth hard.

“I remember having a meeting with some folks I’d call country-club Republicans, and listening to them bemoan the fact that they have no more influence because of the Clean Elections law,” said Rodolfo Espino, a professor at Arizona State University.

We will come to a screeching halt here and re-examine that thought.

Yes! Part of the super-weirdness of Arizona politics appears to be the result of the state’s 1998 public financing law, which provided tons of matching funds to unwealthy-but-energetic candidates from the social right at the expense of the pragmatic upper class. The Supreme Court took the teeth out of the law in 2011, but, by then, the traditional Republican elite had lost its place at the head of the political table.

So Brewer vetoed the very bad no good Center for Arizona Policy bill, with the attention of the world on her, and of course we must all contact her and thank her, for Republicans must be praised effusively like good doggies who haven’t soiled the rug on those rare occasions they do the right thing. Personally, I’d be embarrassed if people’s expectations of me were that low but, then again, I’m just one of those adults in the room.

We really did dodge a bullet and at risk of sounding cynical, I’m glad the focus was on LGBT discrimination from a purely tactical standpoint in addition to the moral and human rights ones. Having it framed as targeting LGBT citizens was what brought the fiercely negative reaction in the media and the organized business community around to kill it. But make no mistake, this was also very much an anti-choice bill. CAP spokesman Aaron Baer cited Hobby Lobby in a TV interview as an example for why SB1062 was needed. Had contraception access been the main public focus – and I bet CAP wishes like hell it had – there’s a good chance the bill would have been quietly signed into law with nary a peep from the Chamber of Commerce crowd because sluts.

The obvious, and only, way to put the brakes on all this dumb shit is to elect more pro-choice Democrats.

Sean Noble is a type of right wing operative I find particularly annoying. These guys are total miscreants but have the cornpone choirboy routine down pat. They often like to preen about how they don’t use profanity, which makes them more moral than us dirty liberals. Arizona is thick with these homespun “consultants”, hoovering money out of gullible rich wingnuts with political aspirations, but Noble has really scored. He was recently the subject of a hard-hitting investigative report from ProPublica, in which he was revealed as the ringleader funneling “dark money” from the Koch brothers to various conservative causes around the country. One of them was Mitt Romney’s campaign – they might as well have taken a match to that money – but others were more successful, such as the defeat of the Scott Walker recall in Wisconsin. Dark Koch money has flowed like a river into Arizona. It funded the legal attack on independent redistricting and the defeat of Prop 204 (making the one cent sales tax permanent for education) in 2012, among plenty of other things.

Man, I called this on Facebook yesterday. After it was reported that Sen. Steve Pierce (R) wanted the Governor to veto SB1062, the religious bigot bill he voted for, I predicted that Sen. Adam Driggs (also R) would follow suit. Unsurprisingly, he was joined by Sen. Bob Worsley (also R).

Opponents of SB1062, the bill that could basically allow any form of discrimination so long as it was “sincerely religious” are planning to amass at the Capitol today to protest this outrage and encourage the Governor to veto it.

Several of these signs will be available at the rally, and some have already been spotted on shop windows throughout the state. (more after the jump)

The AZ Senate debated SB1062, which would allow discrimination so long as it was for “sincerely held” religious reasons. Theocrats have tried, unsuccessfully, to pass similar laws in four other states but there’s a chance Governor Brewer could sign this one if it passes the House. The video isn’t up yet but the floor session was interesting.

Democrats tried valiantly to amend the bill on the floor, including one attempt where Sen. Ableser, hilariously, got the Republicans on record as supporting the rights of Satanists to do their thing. Democrats also cited several possible ways the law could be used to discriminate against LGBT and other groups, which Sen. Yarbrough (R) dismissed as “goofy hypotheticals”.

Planned Parenthood Arizona – Flagstaff Health Center In 2011, Planned Parenthood Arizona was forced to stop providing abortion care at a number of our health centers due to legislation that made the provision of this care nearly impossible. Our health center in Flagstaff was one of them.

For the past two and a half years, women living outside of Pima and Maricopa County have encountered miles of travel, days of wages lost, and several nights away from loved ones in order to access this safe and legal medical procedure. These barriers, created by politicians who have no business interfering with a woman’s personal medical decisions, were faced and overcome by many women – but not all.

Right wingers are forever going on about how the sexual revolution has brought about the decline of civilization and has been simply terrible for women due to us no longer being able to use pregnancy to force reluctant men to shotgun marry us, among other things. But this Mother Jones report from Missoula, MT clearly illustrates how antediluvian attitudes toward sexuality and women held by the prosecutors there are causing rapists to go free, tormenting female victims, and causing some victims not to even bother trying to get justice.

Commenter “Robert” alerted me to an “in-depth analysis” of Friday’s court decision dismissing the anti-Medicaid expansion lawsuit by Arizona’s Own Espresso Pundit. EP warns liberals like myself not to be too sanguine about the judge’s ruling that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing.

No standing. That’s the verdict of Maricopa County Superior Court to the whiny cast of idiots suing the state to block the Medicaid expansion. Judge Katherine Cooper handily dispatched with all their baseless arguments.

There was a lot of hand-wringing among progressives/secular types before, during, and after “Science Guy” Bill Nye’s debate with Creation Museum founder Ken Ham on Tuesday night, which was held at the aforementioned “museum” in Kentucky. There is certainly a good argument for avoiding such debates entirely, as Richard Dawkins does. Eschewing them is probably a wise general rule for proponents of evolution since the debate format gives undeserved credibility to evidence-free assertions like Creationism. Also, debates are too often focused on performance over substance and “winners” and “losers”. For example, Mitt Romney “won” his first Presidential debate by boldly lying about his positions and catching President Obama off-guard. But, having watched it, I’m glad that Nye took the risk with this particular debate.

To be a liberal in America is to be acutely aware of the gaping double standard that exists with regard to the expectations placed on you versus those put on conservatives. The disparity is so enormous that I doubt even the most dimwitted “both sides do it!” centrist pundits can deny it to themselves. Liberals are expected to argue politely and rationally, have our facts perfectly in order, and maintain a calm and pleasant demeanor at all times no matter what mendacious, hateful nonsense the other side is flinging at us. No concomitant expectation exists for conservatives. They are free to behave as poorly as they want and take whatever liberties with the truth they’d like, knowing that “both sides” will be blamed, which lets conservatives escape accountability and encourages them to see how much farther they can push the envelope.

2. There is an important lesson in this for Dems who turn into big, wobbly piles of goo at the slightest sign of decency in a Republican.

Christie famously hugged President Obama after Hurricane Sandy and then bamboozled the public and credulous pundits desperate for a Moderate Republican SaviorTM for months after. He won his reelection for Governor easily – getting one third of the Democratic vote in the state – last November. Since taking that office in 2009, Christie had taken a sledgehammer to unions and public pensions and been a total dick to public school teachers but none of that mattered. Christie’s PR machine worked overtime to portray him as a likable guy with the “common touch”.

Gaslighting is a form of mental abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own memory, perception and sanity.[1] Instances may range simply from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.

The term "gaslighting" comes from the play Gas Light and its film adaptations. The term is now also used in clinical and research literature.

During a debate over an anti-abortion bill currently advancing in Congress, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) suggested that Republicans support restricting access to abortion because it will ultimately benefit the economy if women have more children. Goodlatte noted that carrying pregnancies to term “very much promotes job creation.”

Goodlatte made the comments while presiding over a committee mark-up of the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act,” or HR 7, on Wednesday afternoon. That legislation would dramatically restrict women’s access to affordable abortion care by imposing restrictions on insurance coverage and tax credits for the procedure. Goodlatte, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, advanced HR 7 by scheduling it for a full committee mark-up on Wednesday.

Explaining his support for the measure, Goodlatte [said]:

“I would suggest that it is very much the case that those of us in the majority support this legislation because it is the morally right thing to do but it is also very very true that having a growing population and having new children brought into the world is not harmful to job creation,” he said. “It very much promotes job creation for all the care and services and so on that need to be provided by a lot of people to raise children.”

Now, if you have the reasoning and arithmetic skills of a five year old, it would seem absurd to think the human population, having gone from 1.5 billion worldwide in 1900 to over 7 billion now, is in the throes of precipitous demographic doom but that is exactly what anti-choicers would have you believe.

Today was the first day of Arizona's legislative session and also the day that Governor Brewer delivered her State of the State remarks. One of the highlights of her speech was her announcement that she was "abolishing" Child Protective Services via executive order. The agency will be spun off into a standalone, cabinet-level department. It will no longer be part of the Department of Economic Security (DES). I'm relieved that the Governor didn't put the agency under the aegis of law enforcement, as some conservatives have suggested, due to the chilling prospect of Arpaio's deputies demanding "papers" before investigating reports.

But I don't see it changing much, if anything. At best, there could be some minor improvement initially due to hypervigilance but I predict things will return to exactly the way they were so long as CPS remains chronically underfunded. Defenders of Brewer's administration and Republican rule of the state will claim that cuts to CPS were inevitable due to the recession and that government agencies are bloated anyway. Isn't it funny, though, how child abuse prevention and enforcement had to be cut (along with education, health care, and social services) while prisons were spared? Obviously shrewd private prison lobbyists and their profit motive play a role in that but Corrections eats up 10% of the state's budget (which is about as much as we spend on higher education, by the way) and private prisons are only a fraction of that. The majority of state prisoners are in state-run prisons. Seems like it would be a ripe target for spending reductions and there are numerous effective alternatives to imprisonment at our disposal but they weren't considered. No, we had to hold prison spending harmless even though the actual number of prisoners in the state has decreased slightly.

It's really easy to dismiss this as "that's Republicans for you" but this interview by Joshua Holland on Bill Moyers' site sheds some light on why certain things in government are prioritized over others.

A growing body of academic research suggests that the wealthy see the world differently than the rest of us.

These studies are more than a matter of passing interest. Last week, the Center for Responsive Politics released a report that for the first time ever, a majority of those representing us in Congress are millionaires. And studies by political scientists Larry Bartels at Princeton and Trinity University’s Thomas Hayes have demonstrated that lawmakers vote to advance the interests of the wealthiest Americans. So in an effective plutocracy, the worldviews of ‘high-status’ individuals translate directly into public policies that affect us all.

Building on earlier research that found that those at the top tend to see themselves as being inherently more deserving than average working people, UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner and Michael Kraus, a colleague at the University of Illinois, looked at how those views might influence the way they view our criminal justice system in astudy published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The researchers found that the wealthier the subjects were, and the wealthier they perceived themselves to be in relation to others, the more likely they were to attribute their good fortune to their innate superior qualities. Keitner and Kraus also found that wealth correlates with what they called a retributive versus restorative model of criminal justice.

What we’ve learned in this study is that if you think that there are just bad people out there, because of their genes, because of their temperament, because of their biological makeup, you won’t have much hope in restorative justice or restorative punishment. You won’t think there’s really any opportunity for them to change.

And what we’ve found is that because they have this belief that the people who aren’t doing well aren’t doing well because of their genes, upper-class individuals — or people put into this upper-class mindset — are more likely to endorse harsher, more retributive forms of punishment. That’s true when thinking about crimes and also kids cheating in schools — all manner of transgressions. I think that’s really worrisome.

Our state government is not full of elected officials or bureaucrats of considerable wealth but that does describe many of the people with the most influence over it - the lobbyists, advisers, board members, etc.

Keltner:

And I’m not only worried about our punitive tendencies. I’d also extend this analysis to other policy areas. For example, the idea of devoting resources to those in need, people who are struggling, is a foundational element of a strong state. And our data would suggest that the well-to-do, who are more likely to be in office, won’t have that intuition about directing resources to those in need. I think there are many applications of this work.

Most CPS reports are for neglect, not abuse. While abusive parents are found at all socioeconomic levels, neglect is probably more often a function of lack of resources rather than malice. But if wealthy people are likelier to believe that poor parents are simply constitutionally inferior than to see them as worthwhile people who need help, you can see how this could put abused and neglected children from poor families in a double bind. Prisons might be taking precedence over assistance to poor households for reasons people designing those policies haven't even given much thought to.

I got the following email from Mesa Mayor and (now) GOP candidate for AZ Governor Scott Smith:

Friend,

Today, I was honored to file paperwork to begin my campaign for Governor of Arizona.

For the past six years as Mayor of Mesa, I have shown how governing using conservative principles of efficient, effective and limited government can create opportunity and help individuals and businesses succeed. I am confident the experience and successes I have gained as mayor can be a model for success for all of Arizona.

As Governor, my number one priority for Arizona will be to build a healthy economy, get Arizonans great jobs and brighten the future for our children.

As Mayor of Mesa, I dealt with a $62 million shortfall caused by the economy by reducing spending, reforming government operations, and eliminating burdensome regulations. Mesa residents are paying less in taxes than they were before I became Mayor.

I also brought economic opportunity by keeping the Chicago Cubs spring training in town, recruiting 5 private universities to our downtown, and led the effort to bring Apple to Arizona.

As a business owner, I turned around a troubled company into a $200 million company and looked at opportunities to create jobs and work in areas other builders had long ignored. I am proud of the success we achieved and the Arizonans we employed. I also know how hard it is when Washington bureaucrats force ill-conceived policies like Obamacare on the American people. As Governor I will stand up to Barack Obama and work with our Congressional delegation to replace it.

I am pro-life, support traditional marriage, am a strong proponent of Second Amendment rights, and believe Governor Brewer was right to demand the Federal Government secure our border.

I am a man of faith and it is at the core of who I am.

In addition, I am the only candidate in this race who as an executive in government has actually put true conservative principles into action to bring economic opportunity to Arizona while also shrinking the size of government.

Our state has amazing potential to lead the nation in job growth and economic prosperity. With continued conservative leadership, we can bring more companies like Apple to Arizona.

We can create additional high paying jobs for Arizonans while keeping fiscal discipline with government spending.

We can create a world-class education system for our children while also giving parents control over where their child attends school.

We can hold true to our conservative principles while also being leaders who bring people together to solve the challenges we face.

We can do this together and I ask that you please take a moment to join our campaign. Together, we can make Arizona the greatest state in America to live, work, and raise our families.

Sincerely,

Scott Smith

That's standard right wing boilerplate there: anti-choice, anti-gay, pro-gun, "school choice", drown the government. God, Obama-bashing. Yet I'm still being told what a nice, pragmatic, and moderate man he is. Of course I anticipate the inevitable protest: "Oh but you know he's just doing that for the primary!". Unless Scott Smith has given you his personal assurance that the uber-conservative stances he's taken are simply a ruse to fool Republican primary voters, you have no way of knowing that. If he hasn't told you that then you should realize that you are pinning your hopes on Smith being someone different from who he tells you he fundamentally is. I can tell you from my dating days that that is not a good idea.

I'm about to do a post that is similar to one I did on Democratic Diva a while back but since that site is down and Brahm Resnik of 12 News in Phoenix just tweeted that Mesa Mayor Scott Smith intends to announce his bid for the GOP gubernatorial nod in Arizona, I'm going to repeat my warning:

There was a guy by the name of Pat McCrory in North Carolina. He was the Mayor of Charlotte, a medium-sized city which had enjoyed a good bit of high tech development in recent years. McCrory was considered a centrist, and was the darling of the Chamber of Commerce and media establishment types in NC. When he ran for governor in 2012, McCrory styled himself as a keen-eyed, business focused pragmatist. At debates and endorsement interviews he swore up and down he wasn't going to indulge the tea party ideologues in the state legislature. He was all about jobs jobs jobs! When he was specifically asked about abortion at one forum, he gave a one word answer - "no" - to signing any bill involving abortion into law.

TEMPE, AZ - A sexual education presentation is causing lots of controversy in Tempe and has even sparked threats of a lawsuit.

Planned Parenthood will be making their presentation Tuesday in front of officials from the Tempe Union High School District's Sexual Education Curriculum Committee.

It's not clear yet exactly what will be said during the presentation, but a group calling themselves the Alliance Defending Freedom wrote a letter to Tempe officials saying Planned Parenthood's presentation could be illegal under Arizona law.

Alia Rau of the Arizona Republic is someone I've thought of as a straightforward news reporter so I was surprised to see such a biased article under her byline. The piece is a woman-blaming mess from the title on down.

More moms in Arizona skip marriage

Debate over reversing the trend, providing a secure environment for children

What?! Okay, there's a good chance that Rau didn't pick that title but someone did. Someone who has been living in what culture their entire life? Because the rest of us live in the one where it's still customary for the man to propose marriage. It worth noting that in the two times that fathers are even mentioned in the article it's to describe a successful co-parenting situation and a longterm cohabitation where the couple, who were already parents of two children, recently married.

Beyond that, it's a story of wicked, wicked women who apparently steal sperm from unwitting men. And it's the unwillingness of these wicked, wicked single mothers to force the fathers of their children to marry them that is the cause of most modern social ills. Not widening inequality, not lack of opportunity and economic mobility. Certainly nothing to look at in the fathers. We are just to assume that the flaw lies entirely in the mothers.

Conservatives love this story and have ready-made solutions for the "problem".

Former Mesa Republican state lawmaker Mark Anderson was the force behind several successful bills to promote marriage, including using federal funds to create a state marriage education program and establishing so-called covenant marriages.

He said he doesn’t believe anybody, regardless of political affiliation, thinks the rising cost of unmarried mothers is OK.

“But if you ask them what to do about it, that’s another issue,” Anderson said. “It’s not simple.”

I'm not sure why Mark Anderson thinks I must share his anxiety over unmarried mothers. There's also no basis to conclude that what he implemented changed anything. So-called covenant marriage was clearly designed for middle class to affluent people who already intended to marry and who shared a certain religious sensibility. It was not a prescription to encourage marriage in general.

Cultural shift

Conservatives say the solution is a cultural shift to reinstate the value of marriage.

“Increasingly, and most especially with this youngest generation, they don’t see marriage as something that has to come before children,” Hymowitz said. “It’s been very, very hard to get any consensus that this is a societal and economic problem.”

But more than a decade ago, the federal government did acknowledge the problem. And the resulting efforts to solve it have been unsuccessful.

One of the goals of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, authorized in 1996, was to encourage two-parent families. States, which receive the TANF funds to distribute, responded in a variety of ways.

Arizona established the option of covenant marriage contracts, which require the couple to get premarital counseling and can only be dissolved in limited situations such as adultery, abuse or abandonment. The state passed laws to require more education on the impacts of divorce as part of the divorce process. It created a commission that appropriated more than $1 million in TANF funds for a program to support marriage and published a marriage handbook.

Oklahoma in 1999 started the nation’s largest and longest-running state program supporting marriage, investing $10 million into the effort. But like Arizona, Oklahoma’s marriage rate continues to decline and its rate of unmarried mothers continues to rise.

Hymowitz said local and national leaders may need to be more blunt about the benefits of marrying before having children.

UCLA researchers probed this mystery recently. They found that low income people valued marriage as much as their higher income counterparts. Perhaps lack of willingness to marry isn't the problem after all. Looks like marriage follows financial stability, not the other way around.

And not for nothing but, hey, didn't the single mothers "choose life"? Do conservatives even have grounds to criticize them? Would they be happier if the women had chosen abortion? I think not. Conservatives are also not exactly at the forefront of promoting sex ed and widespread contraception access either. Why, then, would any reporter take conservatives at their word on the subject of single mothers? They clearly know nothing about them.

Just before presiding over the Times Square countdown on New Year’s Eve, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor granted a temporary injunction to a handful of Catholic nonprofit groups, including the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged. They say that the Obama administration’s accommodation on birth control coverage still violates their religious liberty. Sotomayor asked the government to respond by Friday. After that, the Justice, who oversees the circuit where the case was first filed, will either issue a further ruling herself or refer it to the full court.

The decision applies only to the organizations in question and doesn’t affect the broader contraceptive coverage regulations in the Affordable Care Act, which have already gone into effect for millions of American women. But it may signal that the broader court is receptive to arguments that filling out a form for an employee to get birth control directly from an insurer is a substantial burden on religion.

Mark Rienzi, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the lead attorney on the case, told msnbc of his clients, “They’re saying, ‘I can’t fill out permission slips for abortion, sterilization or contraception under any circumstances.’” (The mandate does not cover abortion, but some Catholic and evangelical groups have contended that the scientifically undocumented possibility the IUD and emergency contraception will disrupt the implantation of a fertilized egg is the same as abortion.)

I had not planned to do any blogging over the holidays but then there was this whitehot-rage-inducing item in the news today:

Marlise Munoz, 33, is in serious condition in the intensive care unit at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, hospital officials said. She is unconscious and on a ventilator, her husband told CNN affiliate WFAA, but she wouldn't have wanted her life sustained by a machine.

"We talked about it. We're both paramedics," he told WFAA. "We've seen things out in the field. We both knew that we both didn't want to be on life support."

Complicating an already difficult situation is that Munoz is also pregnant, about 18 weeks along, WFAA reported. Texas state law prohibits withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining treatment from a pregnant patient, regardless of her wishes.

Remember that "welfare queen" from Chicago with all the dead husbands and the fake Social Security numbers whom Ronald Reagan made famous in 70s and 80s? It turns out she wasn't a figment of his overheated imagination after all. I'm not going to give more away than that because Josh Levin's investigative report about her in Slate is so beautifully written and the story itself is so shocking.

I don't think it's possible to overstate how bad the AZ Supreme Court decision on Monday to allow astronomically high fundraising limits ($4000 for statewide and legislative races) is. It's pretty much taking the very worst aspects of our state's politics and injecting them with steroids.

In case you share the conceit of many in the Arizona establishment punditry class - AKA "the Village" - that moderation and pragmatism will reign once elections are completely in the hands of wealthy and wise "business leaders", let me disabuse you of that forthwith:

I've had the good fortune of knowing a fair number of Canadians in my time. When I was stationed in Japan in the Navy twenty years ago (!) I hung out with a pack of expats in Tokyo most weekends, several of whom were Canucks. From 1995 to 1997, I was stationed at Keyport, Washington where I was part of a unit that did weapons training ops, mostly off the coast of Vancouver Island. We spent most of our off duty time in a town called Nanaimo, hanging out with locals. I developed a fondness for Tim Horton's that I still have to this day.

Based on my experience, there are a couple of generalizations about Canadians I can safely make: 1. they think our for-profit health care system is insane and 2. they think we are completely batshit crazy with the all guns and the shootings down here, eh.

Lots of local politicians and pundits are weighing in on Arizona’s unfolding Child Protective Service crisis, mostly blasting department head Clarence Carter and top CPS administrators for incompetence in allowing thousands of child abuse and neglect reports to go uninvestigated. And, okay, I’ll stipulate to the conclusion that the people running CPS are the most incompetent managers ever and their clients would be well served by them being replaced. Perhaps CPS should be spun off from the state’s Department of Economic Security and run as a stand-alone department as many observers have suggested as well. Perhaps doing those things would lead to more thorough investigations and quicker resolutions of some cases.

AZ Republic columnist Bob Robb’s suggestion to sweep funds from First Things First (Arizona’s early childhood education program funded by cigarette taxes) and put them toward “more fundamental needs for children”, is simply laughable but I do have to hand it to him for having the chutzpah to exploit this opportunity to push for his heart’s desire on that subject yet again.

AZ Capitol Times has been doing extensive coverage on the CPS situation and for their Tuesday piece they interviewed a couple of state legislators, including my own Rep. Kate Brophy McGee (R-N. Phoenix).

Tip Jar

Mo Udall says, "I have learned the difference between a cactus and a caucus. On a cactus, the pricks are on the outside." Donate to BlogForArizona to help us keep an eye on the pricks inside the GOP caucuses controlling Arizona's politics. Or you could buy some of our keen swag."
Please consider making a monthly pledge:

Things We Love

Fair Use Info

Please link to this site. Deep linking as well as landing page links are encouraged and appreciated. Here are site graphics you can use for graphic links.

BforAZ Merchandise:

Purchase of goods via or donations to this site do not constitute a donation to any political candidate or party and are not tax deductible. This site is run by volunteers and is not authorized by any political campaign, party, or PAC.

Opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of any other organization, entity, or officials.